Living Donors Are People Too

The Real Living Donor Experience; Absolutely No Hero Worship Allowed

Dr. Dorry Segev is a transplant surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins with many living kidney donation publications on his resume. At the American Society of Transplant Surgeons Winter Symposium 2015, he gave a presentation entitled “Long-Term Living Donor Outcomes; When to Say No“. If you have an extra 20 minutes, I suggest sitting down …

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The Establishment published this essay a couple of weeks ago, entitled Of Kin and Kidney Transplants: Living As My Sister’s Keeper. It juxtaposes the Herrick transplant with a personal narrative, interspersed with research about risks. (It’s much more impactful and entertaining than it sounds, I promise). Please read and share with everyone who needs to …

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Subtitle: Or it isn’t, but they say it anyway… Recently, Google Alerts dropped the University of Wisconsin Medical Center’s “10 Reasons Why You Should Be a Living Kidney Donor” in my lap (or inbox). The exaggerations and misleading statements on the page are worthy of multiple blog posts, but right now I want to …

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A2ALL is a National Institute of Health funded study of adult-to-adult live liver donors collecting data from nine liver transplant programs in the US. Participation in the study is voluntary, and according to OPTN’s webpage (which may be out-of-date, not my fault), there are currently 74 transplant centers in the US that perform living liver …

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The Swiss are the only country to have a true living donor registry*. Launched for kidney donors in April 1993, it provides physicals annually then biannually for the length of kidney donor’s life. And no, the living donor does not pay for the exams. Recently, a German living kidney donor (and more importantly, advocate and …

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I’m no stranger to hate mail, or even a public skirmish. So far, I haven’t published anyone’s email to me, mostly because I generally respect folks’ rights to disagree, and secondly, because there’s nothing I say on this blog that I wouldn’t say to an individual directly (Most of the time when people publish emails on blogs, …

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Yes, I am an info junkie. Fortunately, I have friends who are also info junkies so we swap links and articles (believe me, this is a much better ‘ring’ than some out there on the ‘net). Recently I was sent “Please UNOS, Transplantation is a Fragile Public Trust” by Dr. George W. Rutecki. He highlights …

I officially turned off the auto-renewal on this domain name. So, sometime in December of 2017, this blog will disappear. For the sake of all current and future living donors, I sincerely hope someone will build upon what I’ve begun and maintained. Take care of yourselves.

Before reading the linked article, remember that many aspects of living donor evaluation, care and consequences have never been adequately documented or studied. So, those very real issues won’t be included or considered (the authors admit as much in their abstract), which results in yet *another* incomplete and tragically flawed guidance document. Why bother …

Per a study from March 2016: “A concern for donation-related risk was recently confirmed in an 11-year cohort study of 85 female donors and 510 healthy non-donors who were carefully matched on baseline risk factors. Donors were 2.4 times more likely to be diagnosed with gestational hypertension or preeclampsia compared with healthy non-donors.” The confirmation …

Not surprisingly, researchers are still debating living kidney donors’ risk of end stage renal disease or kidney failure. The two most damning studies say that LKDs have an 8-11x increased risk ESRD as compared to their well-matched, two-kidneyed counterpart. Of course, the pro-living donor people tried to minimize these findings, calling it a “modest” 1% …

By now, we’ve all seen the studies stating that living kidney donors have an 8-11x increased risk of kidney failure as compared to their well-matched, two-kidneyed cohort. And you’ve probably seen the transplant industry’s spin on that data, their sputtering “Well, but, the *absolute* risk is still really, really low” But is it? Steiner attempts …